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Writing like this on Venezuela is like precious cargo or an almost extinct species. It is also like the medication that will cure the victim, if the victim, in its feverish, desperate and near terminal state, will accept it.

One wants so badly for many to read and to understand what these people are saying, and for reason to prevail. I am talking about both of course.

Reading Alberto Barrera Tyzska early every sunday morning has become one of lifes pleasures , he is one of the best pens there is , not excepting the sharp, deep and snappy observations and comments he makes on the everyday travails of being a Venezuelan under this Regime.

Anabella has also become mandatory reading to anyone wanting to understand the crazy convolutions of Venezuelas economic life , a aspirin of lucidity to quell the headache of confusion we experience on hearing whats happening to the Countrys economy or try to make sense of the govts incomprehensible measures .

Having both together in a single piece is something to celebrate . Thanks to Francisco for bringing this piece to the attention of this blogs readers.!!

Really great piece by AA. Really begs the question, what are they thinking? Are they too lazy to really care? Who makes these GDP forecasts?

I can see the government spinning the REAL GDP results: “thanks to the efforts of the Maduro government and despite the economic war, 2014 saw a dramatic increase of 2 points in the GDP growth rate compared a year earlier.”

Every time I see something like this, I just think about compiling all of it. Because at this point, it is very difficult to see exactly what has been revolutionary about the revolution, apart from the violent language and actions.

The seeds of much of what we see of the Chavez regime were in the practices and actions of the past but expanded exponentially to a new scale of destructiveness and corruption . Ortega once wrote that the problem were not the abuses ( literally what exceeds the use or custom ) ocurring in a system ( (because in any human organizations these are inevitable) but when those became the custom ( el uso ) , the generalized practice . I am a bit underwhelmed with the comment ‘but it happened before’ as if that excused what is happening now . What is really important is the scale and frequency with which abuses from the past have now become much worse and common , creating what in the US they call the ‘new normal’. The body of the 4th Republic carried a cancer which has now in the Fifth become methastatized!!